Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (16 page)
It was only after several weeks that Manuel was able to leave Cilicia for the capital. Before doing so he had an acrimonious exchange of letters with Raymond of Antioch who, saved by the unexpected turn of events from almost certain catastrophe, was showing all his old arrogance and bluster; but with the imperial succession at stake, the situation in the East would have to wait. The moment therefore that he had properly fulfilled the obligations resulting from his father's death, Manuel set off with his army; and once on the road nothing could stop him. Not even when he heard that Raymond, having invaded Cilicia the moment he had left it, had regained several of the castles taken from him by John -not even when his cousin Andronicus, the latter's son-in-law and a group of noblemen wandered off into the countryside on a quick hunting expedition and were captured by Seljuk soldiers - would he agree to call a halt. They had, after all, no one to blame but themselves; he was certainly not prepared to risk his throne to rescue them.
When he arrived in Constantinople — it was probably around the middle of August - his first priority was to appoint a new Patriarch, a certain Michael Curcuas; and the first task of the new Patriarch after his installation was to crown the Emperor. Immediately after the ceremony, Manuel laid two hundred pounds of gold on the high altar of St Sophia, over and above his promised annual subsidy, and decreed that in celebration of the occasion two golden pieces should be presented to every householder in the city. A few days later he ordered the release of his brother from captivity and lifted the sentence of exile on his uncle, the
sebastocrator
Isaac: there was nothing more to fear from either of them. He had been nominated by his father, crowned by his Patriarch and acclaimed by his subjects. At last his position was secure.
The first thing people noticed about Manuel Comnenus was his height. The chroniclers all remark upon it; and though it would probably seem fairly normal today, by the standards of the twelfth century it was certainly exceptional. But for the fact that he walked - despite his youth
1
- with a slight stoop, he might have looked taller still. Nicetas describes his complexion as being dark, but not unduly so; later, however, he tells us how, during the siege of Corfu in
1149,
the Venetians mocked him by dressing up an Ethiopian slave in imperial robes - a story which suggests that he had inherited all the swarthiness of his father. But in two respects at least he differed from him dramatically. First, he was outstandingly handsome; secondly, his charm of manner, his love of pleasure and his sheer enjoyment of life stood out in refreshing contrast to John's humourless and high-principled austerity - to which, indeed, they may have been a very natural reaction. For Manuel, whether in his Palace of Blachernae, a hunting-lodge or one of the several villas on the Bosphorus in which he was to spend so much of his time, any excuse was good enough for a celebration.
Yet there was nothing shallow about him. When he was on campaign all his apparent frivolity fell away to reveal a fine soldier and superb horseman. He was, perhaps, too much in love with adventure for its own sake to be quite the brilliant general that his father had been - few of his campaigns were outstandingly successful - but there could be no doubting his energy and enthusiasm. He was indifferent alike to the extremes of heat and cold, his powers of endurance were legendary, his only weakness a propensity for riding off alone into enemy territory and exposing himself unnecessarily to danger. 'In war,' wrote Gibbon, 'he
1
See
p.
82
note
2.
If we were to put Manuel's age at twenty-one
at the time of his coronation we
should not be far wrong.
seemed ignorant of peace, in peace he appeared incapable of war.' A skilful diplomat, he was to show again and again during the coming years the imagination and sureness of touch of a born statesman. And somehow, through it all, he remained the typical Byzantine intellectual, cultivated and well-read in both the arts and the sciences, a man who liked nothing better than to debate for hours with monkish theologians and to immerse himself in doctrinal issues of the most speculative kind. Some of his more outrageous suggestions would often horrify his interlocutors; but Manuel made no pretence of being deeply religious, as his father had been. He debated not so much for the sake of winning an argument or arriving at the truth as for the love of the debate itself. No wonder, as his reign went on, that he became increasingly unpopular with the Church - which mistrusted his continued attempts to achieve a reunion with Rome, disapproved of his frequent tactical alliances with the Saracen and was scandalized when he not only invited the Sultan of Iconium to Constantinople but actually proposed to include him in a solemn procession to St Sophia.
Most of all, perhaps, it deplored his private life. Manuel's appetite for women was prodigious, his way with them irresistible. His infidelity to his first wife was to begin almost immediately after his marriage; on his deathbed thirty-four years later he was still confidently expecting an early resumption of his infidelity to his second. As to the identities of the other ladies concerned, our sources are irritatingly discreet: the only one to whom we can give a name is his niece Theodora,
1
who bore him a son and whom he set up as a
maitresse en titre,
with her own palace, retinue and personal guard. She behaved in every respect like an Empress, and a Byzantine Empress at that: on one occasion, scenting a potential rival to her position, she is known to have had the girl eliminated. Future members of the imperial harem took due warning.
Manuel would always have been an unfaithful husband; but his natural proclivities were doubtless given additional impetus by the appearance and character of his first wife. As early as
1142
John Comnenus had suggested a dynastic marriage, with Manuel as bridegroom, to seal his alliance with the Western Emperor-elect Conrad
2
against King Roger of Sicily; Conrad, delighted with the idea, had
1
Even her precise identity is doubtful, since Manuel had at least three nieces and one
great-niece of this all-too-freque
nt name. The most likely candidate is the daughter of his sister Maria and the Norman John Roger, but we cannot be sure.
2
Though effectively Holy Roman Emperor, Conrad was never crowned by the Pope in Rome and consequently had no right to any title higher than that of King of the Romans. See p.
2on.
proposed his sister-in-law, the German princess Bertha of Sulzbach, and had sent her off on approval to Constantinople. Manuel — who at that time had three elder brothers living and virtually no prospect of the succession - had been distinctly lukewarm about the whole idea, and his first sight of his intended bride had done little to inflame his ardour; but towards the end of
1144
he began to have second thoughts, and after more discussions with Conrad - which culminated with a treaty of alliance - the arrangements were made. Bertha, who had been living for the past four years in the obscurity of the imperial
gynaeceum,
now re-emerged into public view, shed her barbarous Frankish name for the more euphonious if sadly unoriginal Greek one of Irene, and in January
1146
duly married the Emperor.
According to Basil of Ochrid, Archbishop of Thessalonica, who preached Bertha's funeral oration in
1160,
the Empress 'by her form and figure, the rhythmic beauty of her movements and her fine and flowerlike complexion, gave a sense of pleasure even to inanimate objects'. No man, however, is on oath in a funeral oration, and it can only be said that other more objective authorities paint a rather different picture. Nicetas Choniates tells us that
she was less concerned with the embellishment of her body than with that of her spirit; rejecting powder and paint, and leaving to vain women all those adornments which are owed to artifice, she sought only that solid beauty which proceeds from the splendour of virtue. This was the reason why the Emperor, who was of extreme youth, had little inclination for her and did not maintain towards her that fidelity which was her due; although he bestowed great honours upon her, a most exalted throne, a numerous retinue and all else that makes for magnificence and induces the respect and veneration of the people.
1
By the time of her death, she was not enjoying much respect or veneration either. However hard she tried - which was not, one suspects, very hard — Bertha never endeared herself to the Byzantines, for whom she remained too stiff, too inelegant: frankly, as they put it, too German. Her meanness, too, was legendary. Only in the diplomatic field did she conclusively prove her worth, coming several times to the rescue when relations between her husband and brother-in-law became strained and playing a valuable part in the political alliance concluded between Manuel and Conrad on the latter's visit to Constantinople in
1148.
For the rest, she spent her life quietly in the palace, occupying herself with
1
Choniates, .'Manuel Comne
nus', I, ii.
pious works and the education of her two daughters, one of whom died in infancy. Her death occasioned little regret - to her husband none at all.
Manuel Comnenus had ascended the throne of Byzantium with anger in his heart. He could not forget the insults he had received from the Prince of Antioch at the time of his departure from Cilicia, nor could he forgive the alacrity with which Raymond had moved to reconquer the captured castles the moment his back was turned, doing all the damage he could to Byzantine cities, towns and country estates. It was as inglorious a beginning to his reign as could have possibly been imagined, and he was determined that it should not go unpunished. Unfortunately he could not lead a campaign himself, much as he would have liked to do so; to leave his capital so soon after his coronation would have been to invite upheavals. Early in
1144,
however, he dispatched a major amphibious expedition to the south-east, the fleet being entrusted to a certain Demetrius Branas and the army to the joint command of the brothers John and Andronicus Contostephanus and a converted Turk named Bursuk. The lost castles were regained and - to give Raymond a dose of his own medicine — the land around Antioch devastated. Branas, meanwhile, swept the entire coastline of the principality, destroying all the ships he found beached on the sand and taking many of the local inhabitants into captivity, including a tax collector with his moneybags.
Whether or not the Prince of Antioch planned revenge we do not know, for before the year was out the whole situation in Outremer had changed: on Christmas Eve, after a siege of twenty-five days and amid scenes of terrible butchery, Imad ed-Din Zengi captured the Crusader principality of Edessa. Antioch, it seemed to many, would be next on the list. For Raymond, one course only was open: to swallow his pride, travel to Constantinople and seek help from Manuel. At first the Emperor refused to receive him; only after the Prince of Antioch had made his way to the monastery of the Pantocrator and knelt in silent contrition at John's tomb was he granted an audience. Manuel then treated him with surprising consideration, promising him a regular subsidy — though stopping short at direct military assistance; and Raymond returned to the East moderately satisfied with what he had achieved. He would have been more so had he known that news of his visit — but not of its results — had been brought to Zengi, who had consequently decided to postpone the new attacks on the Franks that he was already preparing. The following year the great Atabeg was murdered by a drunken eunuch, and the Crusader states were rid of the most formidable enemy that they had yet confronted.
The news of the fall of Edessa, however, had an effect that went far beyond Antioch. It horrified the whole of Christendom. To the peoples of Western Europe, who had seen the initial success of the First Crusade as a sign of divine favour, it called in question all their comfortably-held opinions. How, after less than half a century, had Cross once again given way to Crescent? Travellers to the East had for some time been returning with reports of a widespread degeneracy among the Franks of Outremer. Could it be, perhaps, that they were no longer worthy in the eyes of the Almighty to guard the Holy Places under the banner of their Redeemer?
As for the Franks themselves, long familiarity with these shrines had made possible a more rational approach. They knew well enough why Edessa had been captured. It was because of their own military weakness. The first great wave of Crusading enthusiasm, culminating in the jubilant capture of Jerusalem in
1099,
was now spent. Immigration from the West had slowed to a trickle; of the pilgrims, many still arrived unarmed according to ancient tradition, and even for those who came prepared to wield a sword a single summer campaign usually proved more than enough. The only permanent standing army - if such it could be called - was formed by the two military orders of the Hospitallers and the Templars; but they alone could not hope to hold out against a concerted offensive. Reinforcements were desperately needed. And so from Jerusalem an embassy under Hugh, Bishop of Jabala, was sent to the Pope to give him official notification of the disaster and to ask, with all possible urgency, for a Crusade.
Pope Eugenius III was in none too strong a position himself: in the usual turmoil of medieval Rome he had been obliged to flee the city three days after his election and had taken refuge in Viterbo. He was thus unable to assume the leadership of the new Crusade as Pope Urban had tried to do; and when he came to consider the princes of the West, he could see only one possible candidate. King Conrad, to whom the honour should properly have been given, was still beset with difficulties in Germany; King Stephen of England had a civil war on his hands; Roger of Sicily, for any number of reasons, was out of the question. That left King Louis VII of France. Though still only twenty-four, Louis had about him an aura of lugubrious piety which made him look older — and irritated to distraction his beautiful and high-spirited young wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was one of
Nature's pilgrims; the Crusade
was his duty as a Christian - and there were family reasons too, for was not Eleanor the niece of the Prince of Antioch? At Christmas
1145
he announced his intention of taking the Cross and formally notified the Pope; then, in order that the hearts of all his subjects should be filled, like his, with Crusading fire, he sent for Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux.
